AUSTIN >> Congress passed a last-minute solution to the budget and debt crisis late Wednesday evening, but two newcomers to Congress from Texas were dismayed that partisan politics pushed the country to the brink of possible catastrophe.

Leaders of the House and Senate had been struggling to find a deal that would reopen the government since it closed 16 days ago and raise the debt ceiling ahead of a deadline today that many economists warned could touch off a global economic meltdown.

After the vote, the Office of Management and Budget told federal employees to report to work today, the Washington Post reported. The news is particularly welcomed in El Paso -- the U.S. city with the fifth-highest concentration of federal employees, U.S. Rep. Beto O'Rourke, D-El Paso, has said.

U.S. Rep. Pete Gallego, a Democrat who represents much of the Lower Valley, said he was frustrated by how the impasse arose and how it played out.

"This was completely a congressionally created crisis," Gallego said. "We lurch from one congressionally created crisis to another."

O'Rourke, who represents the rest of El Paso County, said the silver lining is that the crisis and its fallout might prompt Congress to pass its first actual budget in four years.

"I think coming back from the brink of this catastrophe, one of the lessons learned is that we can't let this happen again," he said.

The crisis already has shuttered the federal government for two weeks, costing federal taxpayers billions, the New York Times reported Wednesday.

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But most economists and business leaders warned that a debt default would probably have had catastrophic consequences for the global economy.

The threat of default had government officials and financiers scrambling for technical fixes to temporarily minimize harm to government-issued securities and keep credit flowing to business, Bloomberg Businessweek reported Tuesday.

Texas U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, a Republican with tea party support, had been a leading advocate of the using the shutdown and default deadlines as leverage to defund the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.

Cruz voted with 17 other Republican senators -- including Texas U.S. Sen. John Cornyn -- against the bill that reopened the federal government and raised the debt ceiling.

Cornyn's office wasn't answering calls Wednesday.

The impasse dragged perilously close to today's deadline, even though Treasury Secretary Jack Lew last week told Congress "he would only have $30 billion left to pay the obligations that came in that day," O'Rourke said.

The country would quickly be forced to stop paying debts Congress had already undertaken, Lew told members.

Some tea party backed members of Congress have said the country has enough daily income to keep paying bonds issued by the government. But others have pointed out that even if such a scenario were possible, entitlements such as Social Security likely would not be funded.

Lew declined to discuss such details. Instead, he said a default would undermine confidence that the United States will pay its debts -- thereby undermining the stability of the global financial system, O'Rourke said.

"He wanted us to know that not only would this be devastating for the economy of the United States, it also likely would draw the world economy into a very serious situation," O'Rourke said. "It would shake the world economic order to its core."

As it is, the congressional standoff has led to a sell-off of Treasury bills and led the ratings agency Fitch to consider a downgrade of the country's credit -- both of which would make federal debt greater.

In addition to the global consequences, U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-San Antonio, said Texans would feel the impact of a default personally.

The congressman released a statement Wednesday morning saying that among the ill effects, 3 million Texas seniors would stop getting Social Security checks, 300,000 Texas veterans wouldn't receive pensions, 500,000 Texas students would face increased loan costs, mortgage costs would go up and the value of retirement savings would go down.

O'Rourke, a former El Paso city councilman, said a positive consequence of the crisis would come if it leads to Congress passing a budget, but he said that illustrates the remarkably low standard today's Congress holds itself to.

"It's pretty amazing," O'Rourke said. "In El Paso, the mayor, the city manager and the City Council pass a balanced budget every single year even though there are sharp disagreements."

Gallego was elected last year in a district that is evenly split between the two parties and he was known as a centrist during a 20-year career in the Texas Legislature. He said he would work to cultivate bipartisanship in Congress.

"If you govern from the middle, you'll find that there's a lot of compromise," he said, likening Congress to an airliner. "People have been trying to govern from the right wing and we've been spinning out of control."